ServiceNow: Building an IT Dynasty

Watching the fascinating ESPN/Netflix documentary The Last Dance on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dominance of the basketball world in the 1990’s, it occurred to me that we are seeing a modern day parallel in the business world.

Between 1991 and 1998, the Bulls had two NBA championship 3-peats - winning 6 titles in 8 years. A truly remarkable feat. Evident to all during that time period, the Bulls accomplished what they did by leveraging the world’s greatest basketball player, Michael Jordan, as their leader.

ServiceNow has proven itself year after year as the champion of the Enterprise workflow world. For six years running, ServiceNow, the company that “makes work, work better for people”, has been tops in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management (ITSM)Tools.

ServiceNow has proven itself as the Michael Jordan of ITSM - the undisputed MVP of digital transformation. But how did ServiceNow get there?

Let’s look back to the Bulls first. How did they become a dynasty?

In 1984, Chicago quickly realized that they had finally drafted a generational talent for their team. Jordan tore up the league as a rookie in his first year - clearly establishing himself as a future leader. He showed that he not only wanted to win, he wanted to dominate. What also quickly became clear to Chicago, was that one player was not a team. Even the soon-to-be greatest player in the world couldn’t win everything through force of will and talent alone. He needed a team. He needed a coach. He needed an organization around him devoted to the end-goal: winning at all costs.

So build they did. Chicago traded future star Charles Oakley for Bill Cartwright and in 1987 managed to bring Seattle’s first round draft pick Scott Pippen to the fold. They also brought in Assistant Coach Phil Jackson that year and eventually moved him to Head Coach in 1989. They brought in role players and training infrastructures. They built a team that wouldn’t lose.

How did ServiceNow build their dynasty? They had a goal. They built a superstar product. They put systems in place. They also realized that in building a tool that could literally transform how organizations do business,the possibilities for its use were endless. They then surrounded themselves with a vast partner ecosystem that could assist with implementation - the last piece in the championship puzzle. Like the Bulls, they had their team in place.

Fully Managed is pleased to be a part of ServiceNow’s championship team. We are happy to play a small part in their success as one of their Premier Partners. Every team needs its role players (i.e. Dennis Rodman) in order to dominate. Fully Managed plays a unique role in the ServiceNow 'dynasty’ by offering our own version of ServiceNow (called GrandCentral), in a managed, ‘-as-a-service’ model. Customers who previously thought the full enterprise platform was out of reach can now have “work, work better”, for both their teams and their customers.

Fully Managed also created a team of Remote ServiceNow Administrators (RSA), also available in an ‘as-a-service’ model, to help organizations eliminate the difficulties of finding, hiring, training and retaining their own in-house administrators. With our RSA service, organizations have dedicated resources at their disposal to help them get the most from their ServiceNow platform.

For Michael Jordan, ‘the last dance’ was a few decades ago. For ServiceNow, I see no ‘last dance’ in their future as the opportunities for organizations to fully embrace digital transformation is just beginning.